Believe me, I wish that were the case. The truth is that every year is way bigger (and thus harder) than the previous year. We have a graph that shows traffic

Believe me, I wish that were the case. The truth is that every year is way bigger (and thus harder) than the previous year. We have a graph that shows traffic over time vs response time over time, and thankfully those lines go in opposite directions, but it's only due to the continuous work of dozens of engineers as we discover new ways that large amounts of transactional traffic and data can play mischievously together. And while doing that we also have to move the needle on product: if you look at a screenshot of Airbnb two years ago and compare it to today, it's very different (especially on the native apps and mobile web). And the screenshot you'd be looking at is probably just on the guest side, which is simpler: on the host side, we've done even more that's invisible to the casual traveler, like automatic pricing recommendations based on geographic and seasonal data, major investments into fraud detection and prevention, global currency exchange, etc. Not to mention all of the tooling, monitoring, and alerting that needs to happen to support all of that growth. None of this stuff is free and usually it requires rethinking how old systems work and interact with each other, especially as we do more complex calculations with larger amounts of data. To be honest I'd say we're generally about a year away from hitting the wall, every year. We've made a lot of improvements (when I joined almost four years ago we were maybe... two months away from hitting a wall? Super scary), but if we all just phoned it in the growth in usage would overwhelm us quickly. Re: San Francisco — yeah, it's definitely tough to recruit out of a single geographic pool. SF is probably the best area to do it in, since there's a large cluster of really great engineers here, but there's no doubt we miss great talent that won't or can't relocate. It takes a lot of work to do remote engineering offices well: how do you make sure that the engineers in satellite offices feel connected to HQ? How do you make sure they work on meaningful projects, but also don't miss out on context and information that comes from humans naturally chatting to the people that are around them? These aren't unsolvable problems (and a number of more-established, older companies have already solved them to some degree, and even some startups that are trying the Moneyball-style approach), but as a team we haven't done it yet. We do have remote non-engineering offices, so it's not impossible to imagine some day having a distributed eng team, but today we're just in SF. Some day, maybe? It takes work but there's certainly payoff for extending your reach.